College and Research Libraries


Americana 

U.S. lana (1650-1950 ), A Selective Bibliogra-
phy ... Rev. and enlarged edition. Comp. 
by Wright Howes. New York: R. R. Bow-
ker Company for the Newberry Library, 
1962. 652p. $25.00. 

The first edition of Wright Howes's U.S. 
lana went out of print within two months 
of publication. This revised edition is all the 
more welcome because of the enforced dep-
rivation of the title in many libraries in 
whose collections it should be. The new edi-
tion will be a boon in libraries which have 
not owned a copy of the first edition ; it is 
different enough, too, from the earlier edi-
tion to be worth having in the libraries 
which do have the 1954 issue. 

Mr. Howes has extended the coverage of 
the book back a half century. He has added 
other new entries. His notes of approximate 
evaluations have been broken into better 
price bracketings. His occasional notes are 
pertinent, sometimes amusingly incisive. His 
:;ymbolization for location is useful. In short, 
the second edition of U.S. lana is an old 
friend grown larger and wiser. 

There are definite limitations. in the scope 
and usefulness of U.S. lana. It should not 
be used without an understanding of its pur-
pose and of the restrictions imposed for the 
inclusion of an entry. Its indications of rarity 
must be taken only as indications, not as 
binding figures. Its arrangement on the 
scheme of a bookseller's notebook entries 
rather than by standard libra ry entries re-
quires some study by anyone else. 

Familiarity will not bring contempt for 
U.S. lana. It will make an obviously useful 
library tool ever more useful. It will have its 
own rewards as a short cut to a knowledge of 
most of the corpus of Americana. It will pro-
vide the answers for a myriad of questions 
by librarians and by readers. 

U.S. lana is an indispensable book-and is 
likely to remain so.-Richard Harwell , Bow-
doin College Library. 

MAY 1963 

Review Articles 

Almanacs of the United States. By Milton 
Drake. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962. 
2v. $35. 

In a Baltimore almanac for 1783 Andrew 
Ellicott wrote: "One year passeth away and 
another cometh-so likewise 'tis with alma-
nacks-they are annual productions, whose 
destination and usefulness is temporary, and 
afterwards are thrown by and consigned to 
oblivion ... it is no wonder, when they be-
come old almanacks, that we frequently see 
them made use of by the pastry-cooks, or 
flying in the tail of the school-boy's kite." 
Almanacs were calculated to be thrown away ; 
tliey were printed on poor paper and were 
not bound ; indeed the word almanac is sy-
nonymous with ephemeris. It thus appears 
little short of miraculous that compiler Mil-
ton Drake is able in this bibliography to 
identify no fewer than 14,300 almanacs 
which were published in the eastern United 
States before 1850 and in the western states 
before 1875. His estimate that more than 
half of the titles he lists have never before 
appeared in a bibliography is easy to accept. 
He locates almost seventy-five thousand 
copies in 558 coll€ctions. Truly his search 
has been an exhaustive one. 

Almanacs of the Unit ed States fills what 
was a near vacuum, as there had been little 
previous attempt to identify them. H. A . 
Morrison's Checklist of American Almanacs 
before 1800, issued in 1906, was a bold effort 
to accomplish what was for that time an im-
possible task . There have been articles writ-
ten since that time, and of course the Amer-
ican Imprints Inventory did its excellent 
work, but these new volumes are the first full 
dress attempt to bring under bibliographical 
control the myriad almanacs which, together 
with Bibles and Webster's blue-back spellers, 
comprised the libraries of America 's frontiers-
men. 

Entries in the present list are geographical 
by state and chronological within each state, 
then alphabetical by main entry. This is 
probably the best arrangement possible, but 
it does render difficult the following through 

251 



of the history of a serial title. Added features 
include the entry number for the first alma-
nac recorded in each of 362 towns from East-
port Maine and Oahu Hawaii, a list of the 
libraries and private collections searched, 
and a good bibliography. Information is 
brief and almost always uniform. Although 
the work is a check list and not a "bibliog-
rapher's bibliography," it bids fair to remain 
a definitive check list for a long time. 

To a cursory reading, Almanacs of th e 
United States appears relatively free of typo-
graphical errors, although there is an errata 
slip tipped in. The book is neatly and serv-
icably printed from cold type. Some critics 
might attempt to attach the pejorative term 
"antiquarian" to these 1,397 pages and ask 
if indeed the study needed to have been 
made ; Terence on the other hand would no 
doubt have felt that almanacs deserve study 
because they exist. At any rate it will not be 
denied that the compiler has herein pre-
served a record of passing Americana that 
could easily have been lost. Any bibliog-
rapher who has ever attempted to locate an 
almanac for collation or other purposes will 
bless Milton Drake.-David Kaser, ] oint 
University Libraries, Nashville. 

Computers and the Library 
Advanced Data Processing in the University 

Library. By Louis A. Schultheiss, Don S. 
Culbertson, Edward M. Heiliger. New 
York: Scarecrow Press, 1962. xiv, 388p. 
$ 10. 

At the Miami Beach Conference in 1962, 
the authors of this book and Gregory P. 
Williams, their consultant, reported on the 
project at the University of Illinois Congress 
Circle campus to study the use of computers 
in library technical processes. Mr. Williams 
warned that the book is not a "cookbook." 
No one can take this book, go to his library, 
and put everything on punched cards or 
magnetic tape. This book is a final report 
on a project for which the Council on Li-
brary Resources gave $50,000, and the U ni-
versity of Illinois contributed an extra $2 ,000 
plus. The money was used completely, and 
I think it was very well spent. The results as 
reported in this book show that college and 
university libraries, especially, must start to 
think of computers as a me~ns of reducing 

costs in the library, and the book explains 
how to do the thinking. 

One of the first decisions of the project 
staff was not to consider information storage 
and retrieval systems which are even now in 
too parlous a state for anyone to reach defi-
nite conclusions at this time. Other decisions 
were rather forced on the staff as they went 
along. There was constant concern over the 
attitudes of staff toward the machines, re-
lieved to some extent by essays which ena-
bled staff members to say what they thought. 
There was worry as well over maintaining 
service standards, and there were great hopes 
for the computers to take over large segments 
of the library routines, hopes that were then 
unrealiz~d and may be in part unrealizable. 

But even if the project had concluded that 
computers could do nothing for a library, 
the report would have been valuable and the 
grant worthwhile. As it is , an important-
indeed vital-result of the study is in the 
report for all to see. The charts, represent-
ing a step-by-step analysis of the routines of 
technical processing, are a kind of anatomy 
of the methods by which a book is purchased 
and prepared for storage and for use. The 
cost analysis of these routines with and with-
out computers gives us a clear picture of 
what a respectable university library has to 
spend to get a book into its collection and 
into its records, to keep track of serials, and 
to provide service to those who wish to bor-
row books. 

Because colleges and universities are in-
stalling computer equipment for other pur-
poses, and because the library can arrange 
to get time on these machines, it is essential 
for librarians to investigate methods of pro-
graming their operations. The report is, at 
times, a little vague about these methods, but 
they are not so complicated as may seem. 
Any librarian can devise a computer program 
of a given routine by pretending that he is 
expla ining it to a village idiot who can un -
derstand only those questions which can be 
answered by yes or by no and can follow 
only one direction at a time . 

Computers are giant brains in size but not 
in mental capacity. The refinements of 
Boolean algebra and mathematical logic are 
an essential element of computer program-
ing-, but there is really no need to study 
physiology and hydrodynamics if you want 
to learn to swim. There is really no need for 

252 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES